If you want a little historical perspective you're home.

Main menu

R.I.P., E.L. Doctorow, “Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.”

Subtly subversive in his fiction — less so in his left-wing political writing — he consistently upended expectations with a cocktail of fiction and fact, remixed in book after book; with clever and substantive manipulations of popular genres like the Western and the detective story; and with his myriad storytelling strategies. Deploying, in different books, the unreliable narrator, the stream-of-consciousness narrator, the omniscient narrator and multiple narrators, Mr. Doctorow was one of contemporary fiction’s most restless experimenters.